1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to devices coupled to a computer, and more particularly, to a method and system for discovering the location of devices coupled to the computer over a serial bus.
2. Background
Maxim-Dallas® provides the 1-Wire serial bus system, under which a signaling scheme is made available for two-way communication between a single master device and plural slave devices. The 1-Wire bus allows various integrated circuit devices, for example, bus-couplers, switches and analog/digital (A/D) converters to be inter-connected.
This allows a computing device (or computer) to access the inter-connected devices.
Typically, every 1-Wire bus compliant device has a unique identification number that identifies the device to the computer. The computer uses a bus-master to access the connected devices. The bus-master ascertains the unique identification number of the connected device using a software driver, and allows the computer to access the device.
One shortcoming of the foregoing discovery system is that although the computer knows the unique address of a connected device, it is not aware of the positional location of the device, as connected to the 1-Wire bus. For example, if various temperature-sensing devices are coupled to a computer using the 1-Wire bus, the computer knows the unique identity of the sensors using the bus-master software driver, but does not know the positional location of the sensors.
One conventional solution to the foregoing problem is to use a programmable read only memory, which stores a location “tag”. The tags provide the location of the connected device(s) to the computer. However, this solution is not acceptable because individually “tagging” every device is labor intensive, expensive and prone to error.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that will allow a computer to discover the location of devices operationally coupled over the 1-Wire bus.